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Wind-up Radios Could Be Boon in Developing World
Radios that run on a wind-up electric generator are all the rage with Western survivalists but might prove most useful in developing countries.
Start Date: 2/10/99
You may have heard about them on late-night talk radio, or seen them at a recent exhibition on emergency preparedness. They're radios powered by a hand-cranked electric generator. They never need new batteries or wall current, and they'll work anywhere that a radio signal can be heard. Some have additional features including a solar cell for charging the internal battery on sunny days, and a small spotlight. Some models have an electric outlet that can power other battery-driven devices, such as laptop computers, off the hand-cranked generator.
Created by an award-winning British inventor named Trevor Baylis, the "clockwork radio" was originally conceived as a godsend for less developed regions of the world where many people have neither an electric power grid nor the financial means to buy lots of expensive batteries.
Picked up and brought to market by BayGen Company of South Africa, the crank-powered radio proved too expensive for most rural Africans to afford. But it quickly caught on among affluent survivalists in Europe and America and has become a popular item in emergency preparedness catalogs and expos. The latest models are so efficient that about one minute of cranking will run the radio for up to an hour.
For Baylis, the best news is that, as his radios become more popular, the manufacturing cost is coming down. The Red Cross and U.N. relief organizations have started distributing the devices. Soon they may become widely used in the very places Baylis was most concerned about, especially rural Africa.
 Excelsior, Michael Lindemann's new novel (written under the pen name Michael Paul), depicts a wholly plausible near future in which human cloning is both widespread and widely abused; terrorists have access to target-specific biological weapons; recreational space travel is commonplace; and mounting pressures of global climate change, environmental decline, population growth and civil unrest inspire radical new approaches to urban security.
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